Cleepops

Our House It was nearly the end of May and the days were getting longer and brighter. The sun smiled through the tiny window of my attic bedroom, lighting a rectangle of polished oilcloth on the floor at the foot of my bed. How I loved that oilcloth so lovingly polished with lavender wax so that the room always smelled of spring, even in the middle of winter. Helping Mam to polish that floor every week was one chore I never moaned about, I was real proud of the shine on my bedroom floor. Indeed I was proud of this quaint little room up in the roof of the small colliery cottage that Mam, Dad and my sister called home. The village, which comprised of two streets of similar terraced cottages and a collection of larger houses across the main road, sat neatly outside the railings and gates of the coalmine that gave the village its name; but to all who lived there the village was simply the "Colliery. In fact it wasn't until I began school that I realised that the two terraces had real names, we knew them as Front Street and Back Street. Apart from the houses of the managers and officials across the road all the terraced cottages were identical, typical two up, two down houses. That is to say there were two main rooms downstairs, the kitchen was our main living room where we lived, cooked and ate, the front room was reserved for entertaining and special occasions although in our case it was also Mam and Dad's bedroom so that me and our kid could have our own bedrooms upstairs. My little sisters bedroom was the biggest, she had bigger toys, but it had no window. Instead there was a skylight in the roof which made it a bit darker. I had the front room which did have a window but the sloping roof came so low that my window was only about two feet high and almost at floor level. The sloping roof was a bit of a nuisance as I had to stoop to get round the bed when I remade it every morning. There was no electricity, we had gaslights downstairs but had to use candles or paraffin lamps upstairs. The house did not have a bathroom either; hanging from a nail on the outside wall of the house was a big tin bathtub which had to be filled with hot water from the copper next to the coal fire by hand. As we got older this was used hardly at all, we went to Aunty Annie's for a bath as she lived in a council house in town and had a proper bathroom, failing that we could always go to the showers used by the miners at the pithead baths between shifts at weekends, men on Saturdays and Women on Sundays but Mam did not like it because there was no privacy and she was a bit prudish, was my Mam ,and said she didn't like the idea of neighbours gawping at her'. What they thought or said always seemed very important to her. She always insisted that we should never look scruffy or untidy and that we should remember our manners.